Nokia N810: 3 Months In

I’ve been using my Nokia N810 for a few months now. Though enough time has gone by for the initial “Shiny!” love to wane, I still carry my Nokia around with me everywhere I go.

Why? Because it’s fulfilled everything I wanted it to do:

Replace my forest of small notebooks: Check. I’ve gotten much better at typing on the built-in keyboard, and still enjoy swapping back and forth between using it and trusting the handwriting recognition to make sense of my scribbles. It’s great to be able to jot down a story idea, then come back and fill it in later, all on the same machine. Oh, and I can carry around a single list of all the books I want to buy/read, so when I’m in the bookstore I don’t have to worry about remembering the title of “that great book I read a review about six months ago.”

Serve as my primary ebook reader: Easily. FBReader is an awesome piece of software (for reading non-DRM’d books), and the Garnet VM lets me run my Palm-OS Mobipocket Reader in full-screen mode. Now if only I could buy more books in electronic form!

Replace my iPod: Check and double-check. That’s right, I gave up my Apple Shiny for Linux. I buy my songs on Amazon’s MP3 store, download them to the 8GB card I’ve got in my Nokia, and use Canola to play everything back. Canola’s got a nice user interface, and even recognizes the .ogg files I’ve ripped from CDs!

Read (and respond) to email away from home: Check. I can not only look at GMail in regular (non-mobile) mode, but revise my Google Docs and respond to any forum discussions I’m involved in. The Nokia’s browser renders web pages flawlessly, and connects to local WiFi hotspots without trouble. I only need to take my notebook if I’m doing some programming. Otherwise, the laptop stays at home.